Semantics

High school (ages 12+)
Thinking & Learning

Name:

Date:

Step 1 · Read the article

Open the article and read it at the level above. Then answer the questions below in your own words.

https://smallwhale.org/articles/semantics

Write what each word means, using the article.

Do not copy the article. Write two things you learned, the way you would explain them to a friend.

Answers below are taken from the article’s stored facts, so they match what the student read.

1. What is the core linguistic field?Semantics is a fundamental subfield of linguistics focused on meaning
2. Why do words sometimes have different meanings?Words can mean different things depending on the situation and shared knowledge. Semantics studies how meaning changes with context.
3. How did ancient philosophers think about word meanings?Plato and Aristotle discussed whether word meanings are natural or made up. Their ideas helped start thinking about how words connect to ideas.

Lexical Semantics: The study of the meaning of individual words and their relationships.
Compositional Semantics: The study of how word meanings combine to create sentence meanings.
Pragmatics: The study of how context influences the interpretation of language.
Sense Relations: The ways in which word meanings are related, such as synonymy and antonymy.